Chapter 12 #2
Well, they were over. He was back, warm and immediate and here, sprawled half on top of me with my thigh still hooked around his hip and his breath ragged against my throat. City night glowed through the windows and turned the room into blue-black shapes and gentle edges.
“So.” I ran my hand up the line of his spine, a little damp from sweat. “Welcome home.”
He laughed, voice rough. “It’s good to be back.”
Simple words that could mean anything. Good to be back from the road, in Seattle, in this place. Good to be back with me.
“Yeah,” I said into the dark, and found his mouth for an easy kiss. He kissed me back, slow and thorough, like something he might have missed.
Cool. Fine. Same.
When he pushed himself up, city lights caught the planes of his face and the scruff he’d picked up on the road. I thought of him in the coffee shop earlier, patient with the kids, interested, and then focused and serious with that donor woman in pearl-studded Chanel pants.
He’d been good there. Present. He’d taken the kids seriously.
He’d taken me seriously.
“You all right?” he asked right into that thought, as if I’d gone quiet for a moment too long.
“Peachy.” I dragged my thumb over the line of his lower lip. “Just thinking.”
“Ah. Explains the smoke.”
I let my mouth twitch up into a smile, head tipping back into the couch cushions. Pleasantly loose, even as something deep in me kept vibrating at a strange, gentle frequency. “Thank you for coming tonight,” I said, then caught how it sounded.
He snorted.
“To the coffee shop,” I clarified. “Mind out of the gutter.”
“But the stars are so very pretty from down here,” he said, a hint of laughter tucked into his voice.
“Nah. That’s just clouds reflecting all the light pollution.”
“And they say romance is dead.” An amused flash of teeth, then he shifted off me but stayed close, our legs still tangled.
For a minute, we lay just like that, pressed together and breathing, bodies cooling.
“Hey,” he said eventually, tone a little heavier. “Earlier, when you talked about kids walking into a room like they expect to be turned away.” A beat as he traced a slow line up my arm with two fingers. “Was that you?”
Jesus Christ.
I looked up at the ceiling. “Kind of.”
He kept quiet, watching me with faint light ghosting through the windows.
“The day we got taken—Ronan and I.” My voice came out a shade too flat, reaching for indifference I couldn’t quite fake, not even now.
“Ronan was crying, that’s what I always remember first somehow.
Some neighbor had called the cops before that, I guess.
Or social services—I don’t know. There’d been yelling, some stuff breaking.
” I inhaled against the tightness in my chest while Matt’s fingers moved up and down my arm.
“There were too many adults in the kitchen, acting all calm, like our lives weren’t about to fall apart.
And I just wanted to make sure we had everything we needed, like shoes, backpack, some stupid superhero toy Ronan was really into. ”
Matt’s hand stilled, then kept moving, gentle. “You told me you were old enough to understand, but young enough to hope. What does that mean?”
I let out a small breath. “Eleven. Ronan was eight—small enough that he still thought someone might fix it if he cried hard enough.”
“And you?” Matt’s eyes were dark in the low light.
I smiled, more bitter than amused. “I’d already figured out crying wasn’t the useful part.”
His fingers closed lightly around my wrist, more anchor than restraint. “I really hate that for you,” he said, voice shadowed, and—God. It wasn’t pity, just anger on my behalf, and it echoed somewhere low in my gut, almost cleansing. Like setting something down after carrying it too long.
“Yeah,” I said, almost a whisper. “Me too.”
We fell into another stretch of silence that thrummed somewhere in my bones, my heart light in a way that didn’t entirely make sense.
Matt got up first, slow, as if our conversation still clung to him somehow. He smiled when he held out a hand, though. “Come on.”
I let him pull me up and overbalanced, stupid with sex and him, caught myself against his chest. We didn’t bother getting dressed, just made our way to the kitchen island without turning on any lights on the way.
Seattle shone bright enough. He poured water like it had become our ritual and handed me one.
“Thanks for inviting me,” he said. “I’m glad I got to see what it’s like.”
He sounded like he meant it, and somehow, that pulled me up short. “You enjoyed it, then?”
Silly. As if I’d asked him to a movie and wanted to know it hadn’t been a waste of his time. I was proud of Suit Up Wednesdays, proud of what we’d built. But I knew it didn’t exactly look professional, no glossy brochures, no business plan, just two people making it work.
“I did. I really did.” He rested his palms on the counter and leaned in just a little.
“How do you actually keep it running? I mean, I saw the coffee shop, the setup, the storage bins we loaded into Naomi’s car.
And you told me about the donor meetings, how it’s mostly duct tape and scrappy determination right now. But walk me through it.”
“It’s mostly careful budgeting and knowing someone who knows someone.
” I glanced away, oddly shy under the full weight of his attention.
“We’ve got a small storage unit now, which helps.
Donated clothes are the bulk of it—quality only, we don’t want people dumping their fast-fashion problems at our door.
Then there’s cash that fills the gaps for storage, making sure we’ve got a range of sizes. ”
“You told me it’s a max of four kids right now, right? Or you’d start rushing it.”
“Yeah, and that’d defeat the point. We don’t want to shove someone into a blazer and call it a day.
That’s a Band-Aid, not a solution.” I’d never really laid it out like this before.
“We want to leave them with more than just an outfit. So it’s talking them through why something works, what says ‘interview’ versus ‘first day on the job.’ How to walk in with confidence. ”
He took that in.